The Amazing Spiderman Review

Several years ago, Spiderman released in theaters to a public desperate for a great screen adaption of a iconic superhero. The Batman movies prior to Batman Begins were pure rubbish, X-Men fell flat, and Superman Return wasn't even conceived yet (but ended up being a total travesty). Spiderman ended up reviving the comic book movie genre and set the tone for all the amazing hero film that have come out since. Now history show that it is the franchise that hit big and went out with a whimper. Spiderman 3 was probably one of the worst movie, let alone comic book film I have ever seen. With all the hype that came with Venom finally being fleshed out on screen, he got three minutes of screen time and just like that Spiderman's greatest enemy (next to Green Goblin) was vanquished along with our our attention spans.

A few years after that tragedy we get "The Amazing Spiderman". This film seemed to try and take a cue from Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and made it a more down to earth and darker take on the wall-crawler. Gone were the webbing that came directly from the wrist, and the dry lame humor that Spidey spewed. The snarky, quick witted Spiderman was back, and so are his webshooters. The problem I had with this film is that what took 20 mins to explain in the previous origin story took over two hours to tell in this film. We already know how Spiderman came to be, more attention could have been placed on other aspects of the film. Granted the action was great as well as the on screen chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, but mid way through the movie I was thinking to myself "Geez its taking them this long to get this movie started?".  I thought that The Lizard was done great. The CGI work as well as the battle scenes were fantastic. But did we really need ANOTHER villain that has a split personality that he talks to? That was already done with the Green Goblin, it felt unoriginal and played out. All in all I felt connected to the characters and the story. I actually cared about what happened to everyone and that kept me engaged. The characters were fleshed out well, it was the overall storytelling that I have issue with. They could have gotten the same effect in less time.

This films is obviously going to go for a sequel and if you close your eyes and pretend that this wasn't done before, it becomes a great film. But I feel like the next Spidey film of this franchise will be it's own Dark Knight. Or maybe The Avengers really did spoil every other comic book movie from hrere on out. Time will tell.